Thursday, October 06, 2016

Getting It Backwards

Christian response on the Internet to the ongoing refugee/immigration
issue reminds me how easy it is to get things backwards.

This is not the first time it has happened, and it won’t be the last.

First, there was a barrage of pro-immigration posts at
various websites that buttressed their arguments with what appeared to be supportive
proof texts: we were to be “Good Samaritans”; we were to “welcome the sojourner”;
we are “all one in Christ”. The writers of these pieces moved swiftly from
cursory proof to immediate and morally-imperative action: “Here’s how you can
help, Christians!”

And some of us did.

The Second Wave

Then, as the number of “refugees” multiplied across Europe
and North America (and, yes, some were refugees, but many were, and are, simply
migrants of convenience), and as some of the difficulties associated with attempting
to instantly assimilate millions of new citizens from vastly different cultures
began to hit the media (not to mention that the astonishing scope of the
problem began to sink in for many who had taken this to be a short-term,
single-country crisis), we were inundated with a second wave of scripture
references that pointed us in a different direction entirely.

This second wave of Internet commentary set many of the
original “supportive” verses and parables back in their original contexts,
where they suddenly began to appear much less supportive, got modified and
qualified, or were demonstrated to be completely irrelevant to the mass-immigration
issue. For instance, somebody actually stopped to define “sojourner” biblically
before using it as an argument for the conferring of instant citizenship and privileges. Somebody else stopped to ask
whether there might not be neighbours in need of a Good Samaritan a little bit
closer to home. Another raised the legitimate question of whether God really
expects largely-secular democracies to govern themselves on the basis of laws
provided to history’s only genuine theocracy. Yet another pointed out that the
pro-immigration gang were failing to distinguish between believers and
unbelievers with their “all one” argument. Suddenly what had appeared morally
certain and the obvious right thing to do became a little more ambiguous.

What’s a concerned Christian to do? Really?

Approaching the Question in Reverse

Now, when I say it’s easy to get things backwards, I’m not
talking about either side of this issue, or about who’s right and who’s wrong.
Rather, what’s really backwards is the way such a question is approached in the
first place.

The second wave of biblical “scholarship” treated the
scripture a little bit more reverently and precisely than the first wave, but both waves were
the product of intense emotional reactions: one, to the horrors of deprivation
and death; the other to the horrors of ineffective assimilation and cultural
conflict. Both sets of Internet pundits started with their agenda first, and consulted scripture only after the fact (primarily because it was the most effective way to gather support from a particular demographic).

But the question of which verses apply to any given issue is
not an emotional one. A verse or passage either legitimately has something to
say about a subject or it does not, as the case may be. To the objection “That
depends on your hermeneutic” [a hermeneutic being one’s method of
interpretation], I would say this: While we have an obligation to follow our
consciences before God according to the best information we have before us, and
while all Christians have some interpretive “default settings” that are better
than others, at the end of the day only one answer to any question is objectively
correct; the rest must be varying degrees of wrong. It’s even possible that no
answer currently under consideration is correct: that happens all that time.

What is absolutely impossible is for two opposite
interpretations to BOTH be correct. ‘A’ and ‘Not-A’ cannot simultaneously be
true. And since, at least in theory, Christians are seekers after truth and not
propagandists working in the service of non-stop confirmation of our own
biases, it should bother us that we are so easily galvanized into action by an
emotional appeal and a few highly dubious proof texts.

Emotional Distance

The safest way to find truth is to maintain an emotional
distance.

I remember being told as a teenager that the time to figure
out what I believed about controversial relationship issues — pre-marital
sex, abortion, men’s and women’s roles, and so on — was before I had
anything personal at stake. Nothing makes it so difficult to interpret
scripture accurately as coming to it with an emotionally-based preconception
about what we would like God’s word to tell us.

There is wisdom in approaching all controversial subjects
this way: to tackle them with a concordance, discussion and prayer long before
they ever become crises.

Devil’s Advocacy

Now of course this is not always possible. Not every source
of social, personal or spiritual conflict is immediately apparent. In many
cases we find that we have never thought about an issue at all until it appears
as a full-blown catastrophe right in front of our faces, and it may well end up
that we find ourselves struggling with very strong feelings about what we would
LIKE the Bible to say.

This is where playing devil’s advocate can be a tremendously
healthy exercise. Rather than uncritically accepting the first two or three
bits of bias-confirming evidence in support of your thesis, try putting
yourself in the shoes of the other side and start dismantling your own
argument. My father was (and remains) an expert at this: no cherished spiritual fabrication goes unchallenged with contrary evidence in his presence.

Dare to come up with your theory first, and a lifetime of scriptural counter-testimony is launched in your direction.

The Google Solution

The ideal, of course, is neither the disinterested concordance approach nor devil’s advocacy.

Googling ourselves a pseudo-Christian solution to the Problem of the Week is a relatively new phenomenon. I cannot picture one of the psalmists engaged in the sort of flyweight theological puttering that characterizes much of our online use of the word of God.

A psalmist’s knowledge of scripture was holistic. It did not depend on his ability to find a keyword and search for it in a database:

“I have stored up your word in my heart,
that I might not sin against you.
I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.”

All scripture is profitable. Singling out a verse here and there because a search engine or commentary suggests they have something in common with our area of interest does not mean we are guaranteed to misinterpret every time. We may well happen to read it correctly. But a man marinated in the scripture never runs such a risk in the first place. He has little difficulty discerning the mind of God on any particular subject. He doesn’t come to the Bible as a reference volume but as an integrated whole.

True wisdom is found in letting the whole Bible speak, not just ten words that appear to justify our case.

And maybe that takes a lifetime.

Letting Scripture Have Its Say

In the absence of a lifetime of learned wisdom, however we find our way to letting the truth come out — whether by keeping our emotional distance or by learning to see an issue from
the other side — scripture must be allowed to have its say. As Proverbs says:

Plotting one’s next move before really drilling down and
understanding what the word of God has to say about it has got to be at least
equally unprofitable.

When, with some emotional distance, we go to the Bible to find
out everything it says on a subject, trusting that — because it is the
inspired word of God — there is consistency and harmony there to be found,
we are in a position to prayerfully analyze all the data and perhaps, by the
grace of God, find our way a little closer to the truth about it.

But when we go to the Bible seeking ways to convince others of
something about which we have already entirely made up our minds, the tail is
wagging the dog. Often it’s a small tail and very large dog, by which I mean
that our current opinion has almost nothing to support it, while the potential
consequences of spreading our erroneous views are much more significant than we realize.